An artist’s reconstruction shows Protarctos abstrusus in the Beaver Pond site area during the late summer. An extinct beaver, Dipoides, is shown carrying a tree branch in water. Plants include black crowberry with ripened berries, dwarf birch in foreground, sedges in water margins, and larch trees in background

Two bears living in a boreal forest in Canada's High Arctic millions of years ago munched on too many sweets and didn't brush their teeth, fossil evidence suggests.

As you might imagine, those bears ended up with cavities — something that paleontologists were very excited to see.

Oldest fossils ever found show life on Earth began before 3.5 billion years ago

Researchers at UCLA and the University of Wisconsin-Madison have confirmed that microscopic fossils discovered in a nearly 3.5 billion-year-old piece of rock in Western Australia are the oldest fossils ever found and indeed the earliest direct evidence of life on Earth.

Artistic reconstruction of Habelia optata. Habelia is thought to have been an active predator, eating small animals with hard carapaces -- such as trilobites.

Paleontologists at the University of Toronto (U of T) and the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) in Toronto have entirely revisited a tiny yet exceptionally fierce ancient sea creature called Habelia optata that has confounded scientists since it was first discovered more than a century ago.

New turkey-sized dinosaur from Australia preserved in an ancient log-jam

The partial skeleton of a new species of turkey-sized herbivorous dinosaur has been discovered in 113 million year old rocks in southeastern Australia. As reported in open access journal PeerJ, the fossilized tail and foot bones give new insight into the diversity of the small, bipedal herbivorous dinosaurs called ornithopods that roamed the great rift valley that once existed between Australia and Antarctica. The new dinosaur has been named Diluvicursor pickeringi, which means Pickering's Flood-Running dinosaur.

Three years ago, a farmer in the Hebei province of China uncovered a mysterious fossil and brought it to the the Paleontological Museum of Liaoning. Now, after studying the find, scientists have announced that the fossil is of a new, duck-sized dinosaur—and when it lived it had an incredible feather display that shined like a living rainbow.

An international team of scientists studying the dinosaur, called Caihong juji, made the discovery by carefully analyzing tiny melanosomes, the part of the cells that contain pigment, in the fossil, which turned up dramatic evidence of the dinosaur’s flamboyant plumage.

Their research was published by the journal Nature Communications on Monday.

A pristine fossil unearthed in northern Bavaria has now been determined to be the oldest fossil bird ever discovered. The fossil belongs to a type of Archaeopteryx, winged animals with dinosaur traits, like sharp teeth and a long tail. The newly discovered fossil reveals that these bird-like dinosaurs lived on several islands—though whether they flew there is still anyone’s guess.

Various scientists have suggested that the earliest life on Earth originates from the natural stays of life forms without hard parts. However, by far most of the fossils depend on hard tissue, for example, shells, teeth, and bones for their conservation.

Soft tissue parts, for example, eyes and inside organs, tend to decay before they can fossilize. This additionally is valid for living beings made up totally of soft tissue, for example, worms.

Normally depicted as lunch for other animals, illustrator Franz Anthony brings a diverse range of fossil cephalopods to life

Although the coiled shells of ammonites are a familiar fossil when it comes to reconstructing past environments through art, invertebrates like cephalopods (the group that includes octopuses, nautiluses, “squids” and their relatives, as well as fossil forms ammonites, belemnites and lesser known ancestral groups) normally only feature in the jaws of plesiosaurs and ichthyosaurs.

University of Bath researchers have unearthed a 66-million-year-old pterodactyl with a 30-foot wingspan in Northern Morocco. Including this winged reptile, the research team uncovered six new species of pterodactyls, also known as pterosaurs, from three different taxonomic families. Their wingspans ranged from 6 feet to 30 feet.

The discovery of not just one, but 15 fossilized brains from a 520-million-year-old marine predator is helping scientists understand how ancient brains evolved into the complex command centers they are today.

The creature in question, Kerygmachela kierkegaardi — a bizarre, oval-shaped water beast that had two long appendages on its head, 11 swimming flaps on each side and a skinny tail — isn't new to science, but its brain is, said study co-lead researcher Jakob Vinther, a United Kingdom-based paleontologist.

A small team of researchers from Germany and China has found evidence that suggests ancient preserved circulatory and nervous systems found in Chengjiang, China, are actually the remains of biofilms. In their paper published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, the group describes their study of hundreds of fossils collected from the Chengjiang site and what they found.

Paleontologists have discovered a Jurassic fossil tail, which could be the missing link in the family tree of crocodiles.

Intermediary Species

During the Jurassic period between 200 to 145 million years ago, ancient crocodiles had two basic forms. One group had dino-like armor and used limbs for walking on land. The other group was more dolphin-like, having tail fins and flippers and no armors.

Utah fossil reveals global exodus of mammals' near relatives to major continents

A nearly 130-million-year-old fossilized skull found in Utah is an Earth-shattering discovery in one respect.

The small fossil is evidence that the super-continental split likely occurred more recently than scientists previously thought and that a group of reptile-like mammals that bridge the reptile and mammal transition experienced an unsuspected burst of evolution across several continents.

Scientists said Wednesday they had tracked down the oldest known lizard, a tiny creature that lived about 240 million years ago when Earth had a single continent and dinosaurs were brand new.

Scans of the fossilised skeleton of Megachirella revealed the chameleon-sized reptile was an ancestor of today's lizards and snakes, which belong to a group called squamates, an international team wrote in the science journal Nature.